AMD, ARM, Imagination, MediaTek and Texas Instruments team up in a collective effort against the mighty Intel-- the HSA Foundation, a non-profit alliance formed around the mysterious art of "Heterogeneous System Architecture."

After all, as the old saying goes, "the enemies of my enemy are my friends." Or is that "the enemy of Intel is my friend"?

What is Heterogeneous System Architecture (aka HSA)? It is a fairly old concept, actually. Heterogeneous-- or hybrid-- processors use all chip components (such as CPUs and GPUs) as co-processors of a "parallel computing engine."

This directly opposes the way current processors work, where all components act as solo units on specialised tasks.

Calling it "a new class of accelerated processor that combines more compute capabilities than any processor in the history of computing," AMD launches its Fusion family of Accelerated Processing Units.

These APUs incorporate – in a single die design – multi-core CPU (x86) technology, a discrete-level graphics and parallel processing engine for DirectX 11, a dedicated high-def video acceleration block, and a high-speed bus (speeds data across the differing types of processor cores within the desi Continue reading...

Open Source clearly works for software. So why not a hardware approach?

The design for the palm-sized Arduino, a microcontroller board, is online for anybody to build and sell knockoffs.

Yet Smart Projects SNC from Scarmagno, Italy (a 2-person firm) will sell at least 60,000 of the microcontrollers at $30 a piece (up from 34,000 last year). Owner Gianluca Martino says he has to contract out production to keep up with growth.

And some other makers pay royalties to carry the Arduino name. Continue reading...

For Q3, the graphics processor market grew 22.5% as more than 111 million GPUs, were shipped (versus 91m in the same period last year), says John Peddie Research. Compared to 94m units shipped in Q2, shipments increased nearly 18%, the largest Q-to-Q growth in six years.

GPUs were inside more than 33% of all PCs shipped in Q3.. AMD and Intel were the biggest winners with Y-to-Y growth of 22.8% and 81.4%, respectively. Nvidia saw shipments decline by 6.4%. The biggest losers were small vendors Matrox, Continue reading...

AMD’s quad-core Barcelona chip will become generally available in April, but Intel plays trump with a 6-core processor (Dunnington) to come in 2H 2008.

"We've gone from dual to quad-core while maintaining the same thermal envelope," says AMD. "This is more than just quad-core. It is a significant re-architecture of Opteron, the most significant since we've introduced it."

Intel disclosed several multi-core projects: "Tukwila," world's first 2 billion Continue reading...

Intel officially renames two chips targeted at small, portable computers. "Silverthorne" and "Diamondville" are now part of the company's Atom line.
 
With Atom, Intel is feeding demand for a new category of low-cost, e-centric mobile computing devices and thin-client desktops will grow substantially over the next several years.

Check out the video…